New Church Life January/February 2017 | Page 57

  More information is available at the website: http://europeanassembly.eu For further information please contact Dale Morris: Prospect Cottage Church Street Stonesfield OX29 8PS England [email protected] twelve qualities of a spiritual mind (Reprinted from The New Church Voice of Florida)  Forrest Dristy  It is well known that the number 12 is very prominent throughout the Bible.  There were 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles, 12 stones in Aaron’s breastplate, 12 gates to the New Jerusalem, and so on. Why is this number so special? There must be some kind of spiritual reason behind it all, and a recent book called Twelve Qualities of a Spiritual Mind tries to elucidate the matter.  The authors are Harry W. Barnitz and Dawn Barnitz Potts, a brother and sister who are well known New Church people, both of them members of The Lord’s New Church. Their combined efforts have resulted in a most unusual book.  The Rev. Harry Barnitz was a New Church minister from the time of his ordination in 1943 until his premature death in 1972, when he was only 52 years old. He was known for thinking on a grand scale, as evidenced by his first book, Existentialism and the New Christianity: Towards a New Universal Synthesis.  At the time of his death he left behind an unfinished manuscript that his sister Dawn  fortunately brought to completion and published in 2015 as Twelve Qualities of a Spiritual Mind, the book we are now considering. In doing so she makes it evident that she shares with her brother a penchant for large thoughts.  In view of Harry’s theological background, it is not surprising that the book contains much material drawn from the Writings, especially in regard to the correspondential significance of the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles. But a large part of the book is devoted to a subject that many readers will not expect, a topic that involves a completely different example of the special significance of the number 12. It is the 12 signs of the zodiac.  Of course this takes us into the subject of astrology and raises the question of how these 12 signs are related to all the examples of 12 that appear in the Bible. So we find ourselves in new territory with a lot of ground to cover.  53